Tracking students’ progress

Wednesday, April 2, 2008 | 2:08 a.m.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced Tuesday that the federal government is going to require all states to use the same formula in determining high school graduation and dropout rates.

Spellings’ announcement, made in Washington, D.C., during a summit about curbing dropouts, did not explain how the formula would work. A detailed proposal first will be published in the Federal Register, where it will be open for public comment for several months before a final regulation is issued this year.

Such a requirement could mend at least one flaw of President Bush’s disastrous No Child Left Behind law, which has always required states to report their graduation and dropout rates to the federal government but has set no standards for such measurements and set no national graduation rate goal.

As a result, states have devised their own formulas for making such calculations, which has made it impossible to compare states to one another or to accurately measure graduation and dropout rates for the entire country. Critics say that allowing states to set their own formulas also has resulted in most using calculations that underestimate their dropout rates, The New York Times reports.

Many questions remain regarding a national standard for calculations including how a national requirement could be met by states that lack not only the technology for charting graduation and dropout rates, but adequate funding to acquire such technology.

Such a standard also must account for demographic differences among states especially when comparing states with relatively stable student populations with such states as Nevada, where the majority of students attend school in the Las Vegas Valley, which has a tremendously transient population.

Still, we support the idea of an overall federal standard that provides an honest assessment, one that better determines the dropout and graduation rates of the nation’s students.